After inching their way up last week, Class III milk futures broke $20/cwt and stayed there today. Cheese prices remain strong, but with a big gap in the cheddar block and barrel prices. CME cash trade cheese prices closed today at $1.99/lb. for barrels and $2.6375/lb. for blocks – a spread of $0.6475/lb. Over most of the past 20 years, the per pound price between block and barrels has been very close, averaging a difference of about 1 cent. That started to change in 2017 when the spread began to increase. The average price spread for 2014-2016 was $0.0116 per pound. The spread increased to an average of $0.0946 per pound from 2017-2019 as barrel prices lagged behind block prices. The spread in the prices came from a number of market...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.